Jo Clayton: Drinker of Souls

The taxi bumped against the wharf. The strange woman laughed at something one of the children said, a rippling happy sound that jarred against his expectations. Drinker of Souls conjured dour and deflating images. The children’s giggles echoed hers, then she was up the ladder and swinging onto the wharf. The children followed. In the moonlight they looked like twins, pale little creatures dancing about the woman, flinging rapid bursts of their liquid speech at her, receiving her terse replies with more laughter. After a last exchange that left the woman grinning, the twins capered away, disappearing into the maze of boxes and bales piled temporarily on the wharf, waiting for the Godalau fete to pass before they were tucked away into the godons. Aituatea heard the children chattering together, then the high rapid voices faded off down a grimy alley. The woman turned to look across the water at the Phras ship where the lanthorns were going out as it settled back to sleep, then she gazed along the curve of Selt toward the many-terraced mountain of Utar. He saw her follow the line of torches burning along the causeway, the lampions that marked the course of the looping roadway, her head tilting slowly until she went quiet, stood with a finger stroking slowly and repeated alongside her mouth, contemplating the topmost torches, those that burned on the gate towers of the Tekora’s Palace.

She had long straight hair that gleamed in the strengthening moonlight like brushed pewter, the front parts trimmed to a point, the back clasped loosely at the nape of her neck. She was taller than most Hina, wider in the shoulders and hips though otherwise slim and supple. Her skin was very pale; in the moonlight it looked like porcelain. She wore loose trousers of some dark color stuffed into short black boots, a white, full-sleeved shirt with a wide collar that lay open about her neck. Over this was a sleeveless leather coat; when a gust of wind flipped it back for a moment, he raised his brows, seeing two throwing knives sheathed inside. She wasn’t Phras or any of the many other sorts of foreigners that passed through the port of Silili, but he wasn’t too surprised at that, seeing what she was.

Behind him he heard the stomp and clatter of the godon guards and the whining of their rathounds. He took a chance and watched the woman to see what she would do.

Poking long spears into crevices to drive out drunks or sleepers, sounding their clappers to scare away ghosts and demons, whooping to keep up their courage, the godon guards came winding along the wharves.

The woman stirred slightly. Touch-me-not spun out from her like strands of mist, real mist spun up out of the water until she was a vertical dimness in a cocoon of white. Aituatea watched, uneasily fascinated, until the guards got close, then dropped his face into the fleece and waited.

As soon as the patrol had clattered past, he looked up again.

The cocoon out by the water unraveled with a speed that startled Aituatea, then his stomach was knotting on itself as she came sauntering toward him, as unstoppable and self-contained as the wind. What’s she doing here? Why’d she come to Silili? He hadn’t thought about it before, but now he saw her… What’s waiting for her here? Old man, you didn’t tell us nothing except she was the one who could face the witch. What else didn’t you tell us? What else do you know? Crazy old fox, said nothing worth salt.

The old man settled onto his haunches, his dirt-crusted hands dropping onto his thighs. Eyes the color of rotted leaves touched on Aituatea, shifted to Hotea and ended looking past them both at the woolly clouds sliding across the early morning sky.

Hotea drove her elbow into Aituatea’s ribs. He lurched forward a step, bowed and held out the lacquer box filled with the rarest tea he could steal.

Ah, the old man said; he got stiffly to his feet, took the box from Aituatea. Come, he said. He led them into the single room of his small dwelling. It was painfully clean and quite bare except for a roll of rough bedding in one corner and a crude table with a chair facing the door and a bench cobbled from pine limbs opposite. He went to some shelves, mere boards resting on wooden pegs driven into the wall, set the box beside a jumble of scrolls and a brush pot, shuffled back to the chair. Sit, he said.

Aituatea glanced over his shoulder. Morning light cool as water, filled with dancing motes, poured through the door and flooded across the table, picking up every wrinkle, wart, and hair on the old man’s still face. Thought he was uneasy with emptiness at his back, Aituatea slid onto the bench and sat plucking nervously at the cloth folds over the knee of his short leg. He wanted to shut the door but he was afraid to touch anything in the but and afraid too of shutting himself in with the old man. He twitched but didn’t look around when he felt the cold bite of Hotea’s hand on his shoulder. His eyes flicked to the serene face across from him, flicked away, came slowly back. The old man looked harmless and not too bright but there were many stories about him and brash youths who thought they could force his secrets from him. Some said it was always the same old man, Temueng to the Temuengs and Hina to the Hinas, or whatever he chose to be.

The but was filled with a faded tang of cedar and herbs; the breeze wandering in from outside brought with it the sharp aromas of pine and mountain oak, the dark damp smells of the earth, the lighter brighter scents of stone dust and wild orchids. It was warm and peaceful there, the tranquility underlined by the whisper of the breeze, the intermittent humming of unseen insects. In spite of himself, Aituatea began to relax. Hotea pinched him. Stubbornly he said nothing. This visit was her idea, something she came up with when she couldn’t drive him into action with bitter words or shame. If she wanted help from the old man, let her do the talking.

The sunlight sparked off her outflung arm. I’m drowned by a Kadda witch, she burst out. Her voice made no impression on the drowsing sounds of the small room, but the old man looked at her, hearing her. I want her dead, she cried, in the water with me. Dead.

The old man blinked, pale brown eyes opening and closing with slow deliberation. With his shaggy brown robe, the tufts of white hair over his ears, his round face and slow-blinking eyes, he looked to Aituatea rather like a large horned owl. The tip of a pale pinkish-brown tongue brushed across his colorless lips. All things die in their time, he said.

Hotea made a small spitting sound. Aituatea looked at his hands, feeling a mean satisfaction. This wasn’t what she’d come to hear, platitudes she could read in any book of aphorisms. Not that woman, she said, her voice crackling with impatience. Not while there’s young blood to feed her.

Even her, he said.

I want her dead, old man, she said. I want to see her dead. Hotea’s hands fluttered with small, quickly aborted movements as if she sought to uncover with them some argument to persuade him to interfere against his inclination. Look, she said, Temueng children have died. Do you think Hina won’t pay for those deaths? Ten for one they will. We’re guilty, old man, whether we do anything or not. They can do no wrong, they’re the conquerors, aren’t they? Besides, leave the witch alone, how long before she eats everyone on Utar-Selt? Hotea went still a moment, then her voice was a thread of no-sound softer than usual in Aituatea’s head. Teach us, old man, she said, teach us how we can front and kill a Kadda witch.

The old man stared at her a dozen heartbeats, then turned those pitiless eyes on Aituatea. They swelled larger and larger until they were all he could see. He began to feel like weeping softly and sadly as they searched his soul, as they spaded up fear and waste and the little niggling meannesses he’d done to his friends and to his sister, and all the ugly things he’d buried deep and refused to remember. As he stared into the old man’s eyes, he was finally forced to see that he would never do anything about the Kadda witch without someone to take the brunt of the witch’s attack, that he would keep putting it off and putting it off, growing more wretched as the years passed, as Hotea grew more caustic.